If you're not familiar with the RSCI service, they cull together various national recruiting lists and combine them together into a consensus ranking (like DraftExpress, we've also tweaked the basic RSCI by including prep-school players for their final year of the recruiting process, which is also why some players may be listed multiple years). The rankings you see at BBR are the final standings for each year; for more info on how the process works, as well as additional data like in-season rankings (fall, pre-summer, etc.), be sure to go to RSCIhoops.com.

If you're also a Baseball-Reference user, you might recognize this new feature we recently added to Basketball-Reference:

If not, it's a sparkline that shows the team's scoring margin for every game of the season, with green representing wins, red representing losses, and the height of the bar representing the margin of the game. We think it's a great way to visualize the peaks and valleys of a team's season, and we hope it adds your BBR experience.

As of yesterday, we only had Pace and ORtg/DRtg for NBA teams going back to 1973-74, the first season in which the league tracked team/opponent turnovers and offensive rebounds (which are, of course, necessary to the possessions formula). However, it is possible to estimate possessions for years prior to '74 -- an idea I developed casually at the old BBR Blog in 2010, and one which was expanded on in more detail by ElGee35 at his (now-defunct) blog in 2012.

In light of the Eastern Conference's "embarrassing" showing in games against the West so far this year, here's a rundown of how each conference has fared against the other for every year since 1951 (before 1971, the NBA had Eastern and Western "divisions" which were de facto conferences):

In the early stages of 2013-14, we are indeed seeing an historic level of inter-conference imbalance. The West's 70.8% winning percentage vs. the East is tied for the highest by one conference/division vs the other, matching the mark set by the Eastern Division in 1960.

Powered by the transcendent 59-16 Celtics (who won 10 more games than any other team), the 49-26 Philadelphia Warriors, and the 45-30 Syracuse Nationals, the East dominated a Western Division that boasted only one team -- the 46-29 St. Louis Hawks -- with a record anywhere near .500. (Aside from St. Louis, the other West teams had a combined 74-151 record that season.)

For the 2013-14 College Basketball season, we've added a few new features:

Seasonal Coaching Lists - These pages list every coach who was active during the season in question along with their record that season, plus their career record (both overall and at the school they coached) through the season in question. This means, for instance, that you'll see Bob Knight as the 4th-winningest active coach through, say, 1994, but he'll be #1 through 2002. This list can be accessed from the "Seasons" dropdown on any page, as well as the individual season pages themselves.

Sports Reference has hired two new web developers/engineers/programmers to their burgeoning staff of now five.

David Corby joined us the last week of October and thus far has been shepherding the NBA and College Basketball sites. (Yes, we did give him a lot of time to get settled.) He is a UVA grad who worked in commercial operations at JetBlue. He's a largely self-taught developer with a wide range of development work. David once played against David Wright in a HS baseball game, and he went 4-4 with 4 doubles (Wright did, that is). He is largely a New York fan -- especially a Yankees fan, which proves we stand by our company policy that we don't discriminate on the basis of sports franchise affinity.

Hans Van Slooten (@cantpitch) will be joining us in December, working out of our newly-established Minneapolis branch, coincidentally located in Hans' home (note we do not offer company tours at this branch). Hans will be working on the hockey site and number of new projects/items from our wish list that we previously haven't had the bandwidth to work on. He joins us from OLSON (where he was a technical director) and, previous to that, comScore. He's a Twins and Vikings fan and will also help me source locally produced lefse and lutefisk for the Sports-Reference Christmas party.

With the 2013-14 NBA season starting next week it's time for a reminder to check out the Basketball-Reference Play Index. In case you don't already know about the PI, it's a set of research tools that allow you to create customizable queries on our database, save the results, and share them with others. With the PI, you can:

Use the Player Season Finder to search through all NBA, ABA, & BAA players' regular season and playoff statistics for performances that match your criteria.

Use the Player Game Finder to search through NBA players' regular season and playoff game logs (since 1985-86) for games matching your criteria.

Use the Head-to-Head Finder to search for games in which two selected players played against each other.

Search for player and team consecutive-game streaks that match your criteria using the Streak Finders.

Also, take a look at the Play Index Plus for even more data-searching goodness. The PI+ lets you sift through the play-by-play data of every game since 2001, making it possible to look for specific events, lineup data, and shooting stats (including clutch shots and shot breakdowns by distance).

Best of all, these features are 100% free to use! So go ahead, give them a try, and you'll wonder how you ever got along without them.

Added 2-pointers made/attempted & 2P% to stat tables. - Now you can see that Shaqdid in fact shoot much better on 2-pointers (58.3%) than 1-pointers (52.7%) in his career.

Added Free Throw Rate to advanced stats. - Borrowing from my old Blog-tionary... "FTr = (FTA / FGA). Free throw rate is the ratio of free throws attempted per field goal attempted. It's useful to assess where the bulk of a player's shots are coming from -- low ratios usually indicate a lot of jump shots (fouls are less prevalent the further away from the basket you get), while high rates are the province of inside players who often take strong shots in traffic down low. A variation on FTr is Bob Bellotti's old Rice-Scott Index (RSI), which is just FGA / (FGA + FTA) (so named because when the stat was developed, long-range bombers Glen Rice and Dennis Scott had extremely high RSIs)."

Added 3-Point Attempt Rate to advanced stats. - 3PAr = (3PA / FGA), and is a measure of what % of a player's shots come from long-distance, another good gauge of how they're utilized offensively. Note that 3PAr and FTr also appear on team & league pages (so you can see what the league averages were).

Added Plus/Minus (and re-added Game Score) to player gamelog pages. - Plus/Minus represents the team's scoring differential while the player was on the floor, and is available going back to the 2000-01 season. Game Score is a John Hollinger method of evaluating single-game performances.